Currently reading...
PREFACE
The projects included in this book are some of the very best examples that our post-war architects, designers and artists have given our city, Toronto. This book is a celebration of their work, their vision and their vision and their energy.
At the same time, the work featured here is fast disappearing. The year 2004 marked the demise and complete eradication of Parkin's Terminal One at the Toronto International Airport and of the A. V. Roe Company's administration building and the very hangars were the Avro Arrow and the Avro Jetliner, North America's first commercial airliner, were designed and built. The cancellation of the Arrow stands as a symbol of this Canadian duality; fresh, energetic design filled with possibilities, stifled by MOR administrative decisions.
The forum, the concert venue designed as part of Ontario Place, has been destroyed, replaced by the Molson Amphitheatre. The CNE Grandstand Stadium was replaced by a parking lot, its majestic cantilevered rood dynamuted, coming down in one fell swoop. The Shell Oil Tower, George A. Robb's seminal work of modern architecture, was torn down more than a decade ago to make way for the Molson Indy. The O'Keefe Centre for the Performing Arts and the modern collection at the CNE are threatened with each new corporate quaterly report.
The fact is, not much has been learned since Eric Arthur wrote his battle cry, Toronto: No Mean City, back in the early 1960s. Little has changed and Toronto remains a city with one of the wrost records for heritage conservation in North America. Our heritage laws have no teeth. Facadism is rampant and we are still turning sacred places like Maple Leaf Gardens into supermarkets.
It is my hope that this document inspired us to rediscover our modern past, to reflect on it and to preserve it in a meaningful and throughtful way; that it serves to encourage and support indigenous talent and to create places that speak to us.
For the industry, it is my hope that the work included here serves to move a new generation of architects to strive for excellence, to pick up the torch where modernism left off and to go further.
For the public, it is my hope that these works inspire them to expect more and demand excellence of their built forms; that they understand that architecture is not an elite sport but part of everyday life; that they learn to appreciate its beauty and poetry; that they be more discriminating in their scrunity of what is being passed off as architecture; that they observe and debate architecture and design in all its glory.
JOHN MARTINS-MANTEIGA/curator, Mean City/Director, DOMINION MODERN Museum of Modern Architecture & Design
Featured Projects:
>> Don Mills; Yonge Subway; Sun Life Building; O'Keefe Centre for the Performing Arts; Toronto International Airport, Aeroquay No. 1; Toronto City Hall; Toronto-Dominion Centre; Canadian National Exhibition; Grandstand Stadium; Shell Oil Tower; Queen Elizabeth Building; Food Products Building; Dufferin Gates; Hockey Hall of Fame; Better Living Centre; Ontario Place; Maple Leaf Plastics; Canadian General Electric K40; A.V. Roe Canada
Comments